


Green Actual

by pseudoactual_mahou



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-01-27 02:29:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12571732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudoactual_mahou/pseuds/pseudoactual_mahou
Summary: Futaba Sakura is pretty sure total paradigm shifts are supposed to have more buildup than this.





	1. Chapter 1

There are certain advantages to living in a limited world.

 

For example, problem: It’s pretty tricky to rig up every important location in a standard-issue life with listening equipment when you can’t look people in the eyes. Solution: Narrow the field of relevant places in your life to your room, a tiny nostalgic cafe, and the far-off mecca of Akibahara, and accept that you can’t possibly bug Akiba well enough to make _that_ work out, like the well-adjusted young lady you are.

Problem: You’re sort of the founder of a hacker alliance which has been basically overrun by script kiddies, incompetent overspecialized idiots running their shit on Macs, like the cyberpunk equivalent of cockroaches, and so you’re probably kind of wanted by the law and responsible for their many failings. Solution: Good luck pinning it on you, you're behind 7! (i.e. factorial seven) proxies, and no one is ever going to buy that a teenage girl is several different legendary hackers.

Problem: Constant auditory and visual hallucinations which you’ve developed because you deserve it. Solution: 

You _said_ , solution:

…okay, it’s hell, but at least it’s home.

So when your limits are challenged by, say, the fact that your avuncular pseudodad is taking in a stranger for… some reason… you want your limited world to keep making sense. Sure, he’s not going to be living under the same roof, but this guy could be a serious X-factor in your life — hell, what if he shows up at your house? You ask Sojiro some pointed questions about his character; he says the kid is a delinquent with a criminal record, serving out his probation at Shujin Academy, and you’re never going to say a single word to him.

Still, there’s an… uneasy tension in your gut. This is unknown territory. This is someone walking into your world. The night he — Akira Kurusu — arrives, you put aside your daily tasks and cuddle up with a few cans of Dr. Salt NEO and a big kitty pillow, and take notes.

He’s… kind of average. Medium height, narrow, black hair, fake glasses. Calm, maybe, for someone moving into a filthy attic, but that might just be a lack of affect. He asks no questions at all. In cleaning, Akira is assiduous, methodical, even a little graceful, insofar as that’s even a reasonable thing you can be with a mop and dust rag. After he finishes, the room looks almost livable.

After that, Akira sits down to record the day, and you slurp down your Dr. Salt as you switch to an over-the-shoulder view of his parole journal; he writes about five lines, then fills the rest of the page with drawings. They’re honestly not bad — a skeletal pirate, a UFO, some kind of barrel-chested swordsman with a mustache like that one hero from Single Strike Man… you take a few screenshots. They’re good, and you can see if they match to any popular doujin authors’ styles later, figure out what kind of weird porn he’s into, establish the boundaries.

Sojiro nods to him and leaves, and you get ready for him to go to sleep so you can pass out for the night. But he doesn’t do that. Instead, he stands up and stares into some random middle-distance point in space, happening to look (more or less) right at your camera.

“Futaba,” he says.

You choke on your last sip of Dr. Salt NEO. 

Correction: he is looking directly at your camera.

Then he runs a hand through his hair (while you frantically wipe up your soda), waiting a few seconds like he can see you which you're suddenly not sure he _can't_ , and recites a familiar string of numbers and a single word. They’re your weird little hope for the science fictional world you don't live in and wish you could. They’re your “what if" contingency, the kind of half-real longing that trashy isekai novels' popularity is made of. You came up with them after rewatching a particularly heinous Featherman arc where _everything_ could have been resolved if the characters talked for like five minutes. They sum up to, basically, a message from yourself.

“Eleven, eleven, forty-six, eight, six hundred and sixty-two, Hatshepsut.”

Or:

“I am operating on behalf of your future self. Time travel is real. I have adequately justified to Future Futaba both my trustworthiness and my belief that time travel mechanics will not erase her from the timeline that she was willing to offer me this code. Stand by for further instructions.”

_Then_ he goes to sleep.

…

So you're probably not going to be able to get any coding done tonight.


	2. Chapter 2

There’s a mineral tang in the air of your bedroom, metallic and oddly soothing; for a time that might be a second or fifteen minutes, an abstract stretch of time, you lay in your bed, not moving, and let it waft over you. It’s soft and comfortable and just the right amount of chemical and you are still in that pre-reality state of being where you can’t articulate where you are, where you might be anywhere. In this particular room, there’s no taste to the air, no feeling of _air_ — just heat, an overheated CPU, or the aerated smell of air conditioning, so faint that there might as well be no oxygen to breathe. 

It might be time for a change, you think. You could just… open the bedroom door for a little while. Let the rest of the house waft in, Sojiro’s coffee and weird cologne heavy in the air. Just one less door between you and the world. 

You picture it, and the mindless tiredness makes it half-real, a flickery still life. You picture flicking the door open, setting up that old fan in the back closet, the one that never worked right. It would make Sojiro happy. He’d say, _this is progress_  — not out loud, but implicitly, letting that long, tight grin he has ease up just a little. Progress towards — everything else, the whole bright, functional world, too big to be anything but vague, a world which looks basically like Yongen-Jaya, which at this point is already like a foreign planet. But that would be next, of course, the streets of Yongen-Jaya. Streets. Roads. Commuters in black suits with thin ties. Men in lab coats. Cars. Women with dark hair, always the _clearest_ image you can picture. 

Okay. So you won’t do it. It’s not like you can’t bleach out the Dr. Salt. 

…Dr. Salt. 

You spilled Dr. Salt after — 

Last night spills into your brain like scalding black coffee would spill into your brain, in that it sears your synapses and makes you so awake that you might actually die. You are suddenly leaping out of bed, yanked out of fatigue and into your room and to your monitor and bringing up leblanc_cam_logs, impossibly slow like this _isn’t_ the best machine a genius with infinite free time can build herself, finger shuddering into motion to flick over to 4/9, the cutesy eyeless kitty icon opening its mouth for a big screen transition in a UI animation you thought would be funny and charming instead of incredibly frustrating because of how long it takes, and there we go, 4/9 logs, after twelve, scroll through the timeline to that knowing eye that faces the camera. 

_“Eleven, eleven, forty-six, eight, six hundred and sixty-two, Hatshepsut.”_

Okay. 

Then, almost as an afterthought, you check the time (3 in the morning; your sleep schedule gets worse every day). Then you flip to Leblanc Cam 3, where Akira Kurusu is wide awake, and looking _right at you with his smug time traveler face_ and you almost fall back in surprise again before you remember that it’s just a camera. 

Okay. 

…when you keep calm and keep a level head, there are alternate explanations, yes, like opsec failures, or mind reading — possible with applied cognitive psience, and also terrifying! — or even just that you’ve finally bottomed out on SAN. But, somehow, the time travel thing is  _on the table_. Which is, yes, the point of the password, but still too much to take in all at once. So the best possible thing you can do is learn as much as possible about Akira Kurusu and whatever his plan is.

Okay, game plan set. Without further ado, you signal Kurusu’s phone, and he wakes up as if he were never asleep, sitting up in a single, deft motion. He picks it up and flips open the Messenger app, which you’ve used to hook him up with a much more thoroughly encrypted channel known only to you. You’re operating under your newer, less well-known and more reputable hacker persona, Alibaba, so you take a second to get into character. Terse. In control. Smarter than you. 

**ALIBABA** : Explain yourself, please.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Totally forgot that’s how you used to text.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Proper punctuation and everything.  
**ALIBABA** : You have a code which I give out only under very specific circumstances.  
**ALIBABA** : Why and how?  
**Akira Kurusu** : This is surreal.  
**ALIBABA** : Answer the question.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Sure, sure  
**Akira Kurusu** : I’m a time traveler, first off. From a few months in your future. I know future you, and she gave me the code. And told me you probably weren’t going to believe me anyway. I'm here to save lives from a series of disasters.  
**ALIBABA** : Why and how?  
**Akira Kurusu** : It’d be easier to show you than tell you.

After a few seconds of waiting, the Kurusu on the monitor completely fails to give you any proof of being a time traveler. 

**ALIBABA** : So show me.  
**Akira Kurusu** : I can’t right now. School tomorrow.  
**ALIBABA** : A time traveler is worried about attendance rates?  
**ALIBABA** : That seems like a pretty transparent bluff.  
**Akira Kurusu** : I’m a model student. What can I say.  
**Akira Kurusu** : But in all seriousness, I know it’s hard to trust me on this.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Later today, I’ll demonstrate. You have access to the street cameras outside your house, right?  
**ALIBABA** : Yes.  
**Akira Kurusu** : There you go.  
**Akira Kurusu** : I know you have a lot of questions, but I really do have to get some rest. Bad night’s sleep.  
**Akira Kurusu** : See you later, Oracle.

And without explaining that particular cryptic bullshit, he puts down his phone, rolls over, and is basically dead to the world before you can say a thing. You’re almost impressed, before a combination of exhaustion and deep frustration take you all the way to nowhere until a normal hour of the day.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: Hallucinations, suicidal ideation, etc., gone into in a certain amount of detail.

Your morning passes in a vague blur of coding and fretting and absolutely _ripping_ your way through a curry bento box, because Sojiro is a master of what he does and you’re underfed anyway. He drives Akira Kurusu to Shujin, leaving you a note to confirm it. In the meantime, you do your homework, which is to say, you start researching Akira Kurusu.

Kurusu’s criminal record is already leaked, for some reason, and trending over local social media, though less than half of the people calling for his expulsion have read it and half of that less-than-half just skimmed. The leaker is supposed to be anonymous, and there are certainly people who would be deterred by that, but you’re you, so he’s Yuki Mishima, Shujin student who is basically a gijinka of plain white bread, whose face looks like the graphics on the Shujin student model haven’t finished loading. Court records from the case indicate that it was open-and-shut: crime, punishment, no muss no fuss. Nothing especially notable in his hometown; people who make a point of not talking about the convict in their midst seem to have just not talked about him anyway before that.

In other words, he’s a cipher, a complete unknown, and thus perfect for covert insertion into this exact role by, say, the government, or some shadowy Freemasonry sending its black-haired cat’s-paw out from the very halls of power. Which is a tinfoil-hat-tier conspiracy theory, but so is time travel, so you’re not as uncomfortable with it as you could be.

So — in lieu of anything particularly revelatory about the rest of his records, you wait it out until monitor two confirms that unassuming black mop in front of your house, looking up at your window. Thank god your blinds are drawn. You send him another message.

 **ALIBABA** : Well?

In response, he holds up his phone to his face and begins speaking. You’re about to tell him that having surveillance cameras does not make you actually clairvoyant when the image kind of… shudders, in a way that is _intimately familiar_ , because it’s the fisheye distortion of space that only ever happens in your room, in your _skull_. It’s the color out of space rendered in 1080p, running across his skin in rivulets, and then everything snaps back and reality reasserts itself without Akira Kurusu in it.

You stare at the blank patch of tarmac. Several different camera angles confirm that he isn’t hiding behind a fence or using smoke bombs or any kind of stealth trick you can think of that isn’t either magic or science fiction. There are alternatives, but they’re all crazy.

 _Deep breaths_ , you remind yourself. _In fact, breathing_ at all _would probably be a pretty smart move_ , you remind yourself.

There’s considerably less fanfare when Akira Kurusu comes back; he just blurs into visibility again.

 **Akira Kurusu** : So?  
**ALIBABA** : hang on for like  
**ALIBABA** : three minutes.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Take your time.

Three minutes happen.

 **ALIBABA** : yeah okay.  
**ALIBABA** : life is just science fiction now, good to know.  
**ALIBABA** : i mean i liked it better when philip k. dick wrote it but people who live in the universe can’t be choosers apparently.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Felt the same way the first time I used it.  
**Akira Kurusu** : To clarify, though, that wasn’t time travel.  
**Akira Kurusu** : You said you’d know what “cognitive hierarchy theory” meant?

You are.

 **ALIBABA** : yes.  
**ALIBABA** : you’re telling me you can get into a first-order pseudo-metaphorical maya state with your cell phone?  
**Akira Kurusu** : Maybe?  
**Akira Kurusu** : I’ll admit, cognitive psience stuff always kind of went over my head, except in a kind of ad hoc way.  
**Akira Kurusu** : The app lets me get into a cognitive world.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Or “Metaverse.”  
**ALIBABA** : meta. like recursive?  
**Akira Kurusu** : It’s what everyone thinks of Tokyo as being like. Peoples' thoughts distort it.  
**ALIBABA** : so a second-order maya state, not an exact duplicate.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Like I said.  
**ALIBABA** : alright, fine.  
**ALIBABA** : and the time travel is just a bonus, or a lucky gacha roll or what?  
**ALIBABA** : last time i checked people can’t brain themselves back to the future.  
**ALIBABA** : and believe me, i’ve checked.  
**Akira Kurusu** : You came up with it, actually.  
**Akira Kurusu** : We… synced my cognition across time to a timeless reference point.  
**Akira Kurusu** : I’m there, and this version of Akira is… running a version of me, I guess?  
**Akira Kurusu** : Never been very good with analogies.

Hypothetically, the math checks out, if “timeless reference points” were a thing cognition could do without some radical redefinition of the term.

 **ALIBABA** : and what kind of reference point are we talking?  
**Akira Kurusu** : The secret kind.  
**ALIBABA** : really not managing the friendly-neighborhood-future-benefactor persona, buddy  
**ALIBABA** : tripping mad traitor flags.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Sorry to be cagey.  
**Akira Kurusu** : We don’t really understand how the paradox rules work in this instance of time, so I’m keeping some key details under wraps.  
**ALIBABA** : you’re doing time travel without understanding how time travel _works_?  
**Akira Kurusu** : Never stopped us before.

You don’t bang your head against a wall. You _emphatically refrain_ from banging your head against a wall. Either your future self is _way_ more cavalier with _the basic fabric of reality_ or this guy is an agent of a power that has fundamentally not thought its ideas through.

 **Akira Kurusu** : But to get to the point…  
**Akira Kurusu** : I’m here to help people. Including you.  
**Akira Kurusu** : There are a few tragedies I think history could do without. When I was living this, I wasn’t prepared to deal with them.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Hence, time travel via Metaverse.  
**ALIBABA** : help me how?  
**Akira Kurusu** : Dealing with your hallucinations, for one.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Want to see how?

Do you?

You turn away from the screen. Your room — this room — has almost a blue haze to it, tinted light floating on oxygen substrate. It is air no one else breathes, still and sepulchral and air-conditioned to be perfectly level. Every texture is familiar, every taste is repeated, every image is consistent: it’s a non-room, walls as close as your skull, the protective coating for a wired, living brain. No one sets foot in here but you; it is your limited, conceptual universe, gnosis flowing in and out at your command, everything supplied. The idea of letting a stranger fiddle around in your head — a stranger who claims to be a time traveler, who claims to be your future-self’s agent or friend or _something_ — is exactly like letting him into this room, i.e., potentially lethal. You should close the door.

But.

But, and that _but_ rings like an invitation, it buzzes in your head, and the walls plunge backwards from your chair as you stand and step back a mile-long foot into the exact center of your head, where you are _cold_ , it is the color of the blackout that hit Yongen years ago when you still knew all the street names and plunged you into the only darkness left in Tokyo, the animal sentinel instinct which stands behind you and says

~~Futaba.~~

~~Futaba, you would do that to your mother?~~

~~You would lobotomize yourself to forget your selfishness? Still such a child. So many years, and yet you haven’t grown up. As if what you’ve done would go away, just because you forgot. Like flicking out a light and forgetting it was ever there. Futaba, maybe you’re just an idiot. Even with all that expensive education and your high-speed internet connection. Futaba, Sojiro barely even uses the internet. It’s all for you. So was the printer. The printer _s_. And the computer parts, and the cameras, and the endless ready meals. You know he doesn’t serve the curry in Leblanc. Not nearly enough to justify how much there is for you. Once a parasite, always a parasite, Futaba. You know, with your bug eyes and your garish hair and clothes, you remind me of a snake. An asp, maybe. An asp whose coloration is supposed to warn us that it is venomous. But I suppose I was too attached to the idea that the asp might be my little girl. Serves your mother right, hm, Futaba. Serves her right to think it was postpartum depression, or work-related stress, or even that she might’ve been a bad mother, instead of the simple fact of the matter, which is that you were born a vapid, demanding little snake and never grew up. A child so incapable of dealing with other people that she locked herself in her bedroom as soon as life was even a little hard. A pathetic little idiot child who steals, yes, steals from her mother. You want my research only once I’m dead. You keep me from finishing with your incessant whinging and then you take the research for your little entertainment. Maybe you want to watch Featherman instead? Maybe play with your toys? A girl of your age playing with toys. Nothing but a child. My life's work is wasted on you. The only extant copies in _your_ hands. It’s funny. Futaba, it’s funny. If I were alive, I wouldn’t be able to stop laughing. I’d laugh until I vomited. I’d laugh until I couldn’t breathe and my lungs collapsed. But you know what that looks like already. Maybe you’ll sell cognitive psience, the future of psycho-medical technology, to finance your little gaming habit. Wouldn’t that be ironic? Once Sojiro is dead, that will be all you have, Futaba. Futaba, I don’t think you’re listening. Stand up. Your posture is disgusting when you curl up like that. What kind of girl do you expect to be if you curl up into a ball whenever someone lectures you? And you smell vile. Not that taking a shower will help. If you live like this, you will always smell vile, taste vile, look dead, smell dead. In fact, Futaba, you _are_ dead. You are dead, Futaba, and you’ve gone to the trouble of closing yourself up not in a grave, but in this room that will have to be cleaned and aired out, and you have devoured enormous amounts of food, left trash which will have to be disposed of properly. Even in death, Futaba, you are going to disappoint me, you are wasting precious time and space~~

 

 

 

 

 

…it fades out eventually.

You are all alone in a little room and you are aware, again, of the fact that you are going to die in here. It sometimes goes away. And of course she never quite screams. It's always that long, insistent, meandering conversation that is almost a scream. She's better than the men in the suits, reading out her suicide note; at least you can feel like you _deserve_ her.

And instead of dying in here, you stand up and you walk over to the computer and you wait for the surging sound in your ears, which is always the last thing to go, to fade out and be replaced by the steady hum of the machine. You think about how you cannot possibly trust another person to root around in your brain. And you send the message

 **Akira Kurusu** : Hello?  
**Akira Kurusu** : Are you there?  
**Akira Kurusu** : Is everything alright?  
**ALIBABA** : show me before I change my mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the lateness of this update; I've been dealing with my dog's death.


	4. Chapter 4

As it turns out, he can’t do it yet.

Akira Kurusu’s process, whatever it is, involves a lot of time and effort, which means starting at night, when you’ll have a full night to _work_ (as opposed to right here and now, where you’ll have maybe half an hour before Sojiro deals with the traffic, finds his house and cafe both empty and draws some less-than-ideal conclusions). So once he’s explained that, he just sort of… walks back to Leblanc, settles in upstairs, does some homework. Sojiro arrives and compliments Kurusu on his speed and work ethic, in that kind of backhanded way he uses with people he doesn’t know well — “Keep that up, and maybe this year’ll be less of a pain for all of us” — then works until Leblanc closes.

As per usual, you hear him before you see him, the floor outside your room creaking. His knock is shave-and-a-haircut, like always. Once you knock back two-bits, Sojiro speaks through the door, which isn’t strictly necessary, since you’ve got the hallway wired, but he says he doesn’t like talking to his ceiling. “Still awake?”

“Yup.” Also as per usual, you keep watching the back of his head on the camera while he (sight unseen) opens your door a crack and slips through your dinner, packaged in a vibrant green box that you’ve basically Pavlov-ed yourself into getting hungry at the sight of. On top is a bottled barley tea. It lingers open for a few seconds as you turn around and stand up, but by the time you’ve got them, he’s already shut the door. “Gracias.”

“Just remember to leave it out so I can wash it tomorrow,” he says.

“How’d it go with, uh… what’s-his-name?”

“Nothing special,” says Sojiro, snorting. “Though I have to say, the kid is pretty conscientious, for someone in his situation."

“Huh.”

“What brought this on?” There’s an uncertain tone in his voice you can’t identify; it’s questioning, not prodding, a little aimless. “If I’m not mistaken, you’ve got every room in Leblanc wired. You’ve seen more of him than I have.”

“Well, yeah, but.” Luckily, you have years and years of experience in lying to this one specific person in your life, so the words come easily. “Not a lot of practice reading actual people. If I had his browser history, maybe.”

“Hands off.”

“I knoooow."

"Well, Kurusu's nothing for you to be concerned about. He’s not setting foot in this house unless Leblanc burns down.”

“Harsh, Sojiro,” you say, and crumple a paper cup in your hand. Systems nominal. Heartbeat green. You are _very_ experienced at lying to Sojiro. He bids you goodnight not knowing anything about how you have cleaned a little, made available the discreet Featherman sword that you were supposed to get peacebonded but didn’t, which obviously doesn’t hold an edge — it’s ornamental, one step above boffer stuff — but will, if necessary, make a shin ache like a bastard. No evidence he’s immune to weapons, or anything; for all that Akira Kurusu can travel out of reality, if needs must, you’ll apply everything you have to kneecapping him.

Not that you can do all that much.

Or, in fact, anything.

Weak as you are. There’s a closet to hide in, after all. Another little escape hatch. Very thoughtful man, that Sojiro Sakura. Very kind to his daughter.

The fans sound like a hoarse little chuckle. You know yourself well enough to tamp down on the thought, but it's too late to enjoy eating your dinner. You settle for having it, instead.

Six hours later, he's standing inside your house.

When you first check on him — allowing a healthy buffer between surveillance and the appointed time — he's out like a light, so early that you’re actually in awe, a little. That degree of control over his sleep schedule — to you, at the mercy of your underfed, exercise-free kitbash of a body — is _incredible_ . When his alarm rings, he sits up, stretches, then stands differently from the weird, half-confident slouch he approached you in early on. Low to the ground, still, but there’s a weird poise to the way he walks, almost too calm in its sharpness — like the protagonist in some bizarre light novel adaptation. Fluid movements, too, not the cantilever swinging of your basic moody teenager. He’s economically out of Leblanc without turning the lights on, padfoot familiar like he’s worked the layout into muscle memory already, which he apparently _has_ , so yeah. In about a minute, he’s at your door.

**Akira Kurusu** : I’ll let myself in.  
**ALIBABA** : sojiro gave you a key?  
**Akira Kurusu** : Your lock is very pickable, actually. I’d recommend replacing it.

You sit back down and watch him pick the lock on your front door, your breath held. Sojiro Sakura, whatever his faults as a parent, pays a lot of attention to you, and sleeps like he’s expecting assassins. If Akira Kurusu makes the slightest noise—

The door glides open, and Kurusu slips inside, is in the shoe room. Doesn’t take his shoes off. Eyes on his phone, he walks directly towards your room. His gait is natural, and makes no noise that you or your many audio rigs can pick up, like he’s stuffed the universe with cotton.

Something occurs to you.

**ALIBABA** : heads up, if you try to pick my lock i will wake the dead screaming and sojiro will teach you about some interesting new parts of you that can hurt on cold days.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Not a problem.  
**Akira Kurusu** : I will be asking you to open your door, but on your terms.

And now Akira Kurusu is outside your room. He looks at your door like it doesn’t exist.

**ALIBABA** : you can’t just teleport in here?  
**Akira Kurusu** : I’d rather respect your privacy.  
**ALIBABA** : said the guy who apparently carries around burglary equipment for funsies.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Touché.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Seriously, though. I don’t want to break in to your room.

It’s possible that he _can’t_ teleport into your room, since he’s not using that app to just bypass your lock entirely. You file away that speculation for future use.

**ALIBABA** : you can’t do your clarke tech magic through a wooden door?  
**ALIBABA** : score minus one million for future us.  
**Akira Kurusu** : More or less.  
**ALIBABA** : i’ll unlock it, but give me a minute.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Okay.

Obediently, he waits — or you assume he waits — while you stand up, manually unlock your door, then scurry back to your chair and double-check all your notes are encrypted. After that, you switch off your monitor, step into your closet and breathe in the vague must of clothes unworn so long that they’re not quite clean. The Featherman sword feels ridiculous strapped to your hip in a purely decorative hilt, but it still makes you feel just a little better.

**ALIBABA** : go.  
**ALIBABA** : get in, get out.

There’s a shuffling noise.

**Akira Kurusu** : To clarify, I’m also going to need you to open the closet.  
**ALIBABA** : yeah that’s convenient.  
**ALIBABA** : and you can’t get me through a closet.  
**ALIBABA** : what the hell kind of future can rewrite time and the cognitive gestalt but not furniture?  
**ALIBABA** : what, scared of clipping into the wall?  
**Akira Kurusu** : I just don’t want to violate your boundaries. Honestly.  
**Akira Kurusu** : All you have to do is open the door and step out. I’ll keep to the other side of the room.  
**Akira Kurusu** : And it doesn’t have to be now. If you can’t deal with this tonight, I’ve got no shortage of things to do while I’m back. Take as much time as you need.  
**Akira Kurusu** : Not to mention I’m throwing off my sleep schedule.

Okay.

Okay.

You breathe in.

You breathe out.

You almost crush a finger in the handle as you pull the whole collapsible closet door open in a long sweep that kind of jams together the moving parts so it makes an agonized sound like an accordion on its last legs, mercifully quiet in the night. And you step out, keeping your eyes up, the saber in your hand as subtle as you can make it.

“H--"

Akira Kurusu’s eyes glint like chips of iron striking each other; he’s smiling, half-real in this darkness. A few seconds pass where he fails to kill you.

Okay.

Okay, Futaba.

“...how does it work?"

“Like this.” Kurusu holds up his phone and speaks into it. “Futaba Sakura. Bedroom. Tomb.”

There’s been an aftertaste in your mouth, salt and chemicals and toothpaste. It turns to copper. Then it becomes a solid, a sensory rupture like a balloon with its origin point in your spine, electrochemical-metaphysical. You double over, feeling what must be vertigo, only — of course — there’s no floor beneath your feet, you’re falling _forward_ , into a wall which is sweating the color out of space, every angle bending into endless fractal miniatures out of which you can almost see — _something_ — something you can’t put words to except that it makes you want to vomit out some kind of deep psychic pollution and watch all of you stream out into the air, the infinitely distant walls the blackened vault of cognitive space, your skull blowing up and up and _up_ into a titanic magnificent migraine that you can taste in the air, a migraine that isn’t yours but _everyone’s_ and inside/outside your recursive skull and throbbing electric systematic brain slowly fading in the dark,

…and that rushing sound that returns to you without warning, the undifferentiated sound of your decaying psyche getting louder and louder, the carpet breathing out that scent that still anchors you to reality until even the hook of it is gone and —

And it’s gone.

There’s light in your eyes, making you squint.

There’s _sunlight_.

It may be a foreign thing to you now, but there’s no way you could ever forget sunlight on your face. And in your eyes, actually, kind of giving you a headache. You shade your eyes, take a step to the left, manage to get out of the hole Akira Kurusu apparently put in your wall and several layers of roofing.

The shaft of light is cutting through a wall of stone that flickers with familiar symbols, ASCII and kaomoji and malformed programs in what you think might be Ruby, in a flickering lime green. Outside the sunlight, its oppressive heat, there's just the familiar homogenous chill of your room, only it's suddenly almost icy in comparison, raising goosebumps on your arms. Cold, and that surging sound, somewhere outside your head — hissing all around you, in every direction.

"Where...?"

You turn a little and immediately jump back from a mysterious stranger in all black, who turns to give you a sinister look and almost advances a step. You brandish the Feathersaber which isn't in your fingers any longer, belatedly realize you dropped it and fall to grab it in a move that would be dumb for someone twice as coordinated as you. Your bare foot catches on it and sends it spinning.

...

Considering that the stranger hasn't murdered you yet, you decide it's safe to look up at him. From this angle, your recognize a jacket black like diamond-bearing velvet, two splashes of vibrant red resolving into gloved hands, almost imperial in its stylish wickedness, like a vizier who wants everyone to know he's going to betray them. A bone-white mask with black marks like jagged eyelashes completes the look of anachronism, bold as obsidian, cruel as brass. It's... familiar? It's 

"Sorry. Didn't remember how disorienting that is your first time."

It's also _Akira Kurusu_.

"...what're you  _wearing_?" you ask, standing up straight. "Did you change while I wasn't looking?"

He adjusts his gloves. "It's a cognitive effect. The Palace is treating me as a foreign element and trying to change my form, but my cognition resists it with this outfit." Then he blinks, and frowns a little. "...hm. That's a little worrying."

" _Worrying_."

"Well, at least we're starting inside this time... no doors, either." Akira peers up the stairs. "Shouldn't be long enough to risk anything either way."

"Rewriting reality via cognition. Okay. Were you maybe going to  _tell_ me that it was going to try and get read/write permission on my body before you let me come in here unarmed in my PJs?"

"We're in your head, so you should be immune." Kurusu walks by you, and you start following. "Just stay behind me, and we'll be alright."

"If and _only if_ you start explaining any of this." There's too much to effectively call out, so you just gesture at everything your arms can reach. "Cognitive psience doesn't say anything about Ancient Egyptian spaceman labyrinths."

"It's your own distorted —"

There's a few seconds of silence.

"My own distorted what?" you say.

Kurusu says nothing, but you see his back tense up.

"What?" You look around him and

 

~~"Hello, Futaba."~~

 

She's

there.

She wears a golden headdress, one you know in a distant way is called a _nemes_. Bracelets, rubies and diamonds and sapphires inset in a shining gorget, bandages running up her throat strangulation-close. Her eyes are as dull as lead. Even so, she is beautiful. Beautiful. Pristine.

 

~~"You've come back again."~~

 

Akira Kurusu is whispering something, intently, and his hand is thrown back as if to hold you back or keep you close or block some kind of bullet, as if the sound isn't perfectly ordinary. As if it isn't as familiar as the insides of your skin, the bone of your skull, the pressure at your temples. He is whispering, and then speaking out loud, some anonymous word that conjures up a blue haze of fire between you and her that he thinks will hold anything at all. Even through that fire you see her, hear her, the woman who is nothing but a voice and a pressure differential.

 

~~"To tear me apart a second time. I pull you close, and you kill me. Will you really tear me even now, when I have run as far as I possibly can? When I am dead? Do you need your mother so badly that you would dismember her corpse?"~~

 

A shape makes noises. You are shaking, or maybe the walls are shaking and you are still.

 

~~"Haven't you done enough?"~~

 

Someone turns and runs and doors thud shut and there is a hideous rumbling and then you are falling, falling into the rushing sound, feeling it run over your skin and  _falling_...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, folks. Finals and grief converged.

**Author's Note:**

> This may not end up going anywhere. Let's find out together!
> 
> Make note that this is primarily going to get written while I'm sleep-deprived, so chapters may be edited for clarity, conciseness, quality. If an edit affects plot, I'll let you know.


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